Month: December 2017

WASHINGTON, DC – This morning, President Trump took to Twitter to voice concerns about the United States Postal Service.

He wrote, “Why is the United States Post Office, which is losing many billions of dollars a year, while charging Amazon and others so little to deliver their packages, making Amazon richer and the Post Office dumber and poorer? Should be charging MUCH MORE!”

It is unclear if Amazon is the source of the Postal Service’s financial troubles because the details of any deals between the Postal Service and retail giant are confidential, and the financial troubles of the Postal Service are often attributed to the requirement that it pre-fund its employee’s health insurance benefits and to the decreasing volume of first-class mail.

According to a Forbes article, shipping industry analyst David Vernon “estimated…that Amazon pays the USPS $2 per package, which is about half of what it would pay United Parcel Service and FedEx.”

The Forbes article noted that Postal Service chief financial officer Joseph Corbett “wrote in a post for PostalReporter.com in August that the [Postal Service] is required by law to charge retailers at least enough to cover its delivery costs.”

In 2013, the Postal Service made an agreement with Amazon to deliver packages on Sundays. The Postal Service also provides “last-mile” delivery for the retailer.

The Postal Service offered no comment in response to the tweet.

While Congressman Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) introduced postal reform legislation in January, Congress has made no recent moves to reform the Postal Service.

The U.S. Postal Service has released issue dates and cities for 10 stamps to be issued in the first quarter of 2018. All are single-stamp issues with the exception of the 10-stamp Bioluminescent Life issue.

The year’s first stamp will be the Year of the Dog Lunar New Year forever stamp scheduled for a January 11 release in Honolulu, Hawaii.

The U.S. Postal Service kicks off its 2018 stamp program in January with a Lunar New Year forever stamp celebrating the Year of the Dog.

The stamp will be formally issued January 11 at the Chinatown Cultural Plaza in Honolulu, Hawaii. The Year of the Dog begins February 16 and ends February 4, 2019.

This is the 11th of 12 stamps in the Celebrating Lunar New Year series, which features primary art from illustrator Kam Mak, a Hong Kong-born artist who grew up in New York City’s Chinatown and now lives in Brooklyn.

The stamps in the current series, designed by Ethel Kessler, also incorporate elements from a previous Lunar New Year series: Clarence Lee’s intricate cut-paper design of a dog, and the Chinese character for “dog,” drawn in grass-style calligraphy by Lau Bun. Those elements graced U.S. Lunar New Year stamps issued found in stamps issued from 1992 through 2004.

The Lunar New Year is the most important holiday of the year for many Asian communities around the world and is celebrated primarily by people of Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Tibetan and Mongolian heritage.

The U.S. Postal Service introduced its Celebrating Lunar New Year series, with stamps featuring artwork from Mak, in 2008. The series will continue through 2019 with a stamp for the Year of the Boar. Year of the Dog is being issued as a souvenir sheet of 12 self-adhesive Forever stamps.

The Year of the Dog illustration, originally created using oil paints on panel, depicts an arrangement of lucky bamboo (Dracaena braunii). To the right is a lozenge-shaped piece of red paper with the Chinese character “fu,” meaning good fortune, rendered in calligraphy — a common decoration on doors and entryways during Lunar New Year festivities.

Previous Years of the Dog started in January or February of 1934, 1946, 1958, 1970, 1982, 1994 and 2006.

CCC club member Leonard Hartmann accepted the award, which included a €2,000 prize, on behalf of the club.

The Collectors Club of Chicago offered the following details:

This book starts with the development of the early railroads in a historical context and then focuses on the establishment, routes the cities and towns served as it relates the philatelic information. The mail contract route information is well organized and includes dates, route numbers, contract agreement and cost per mile.

The basic arrangement of the book is by states accompanied by charts, copies of detailed maps locating town and a detailed list of the stations served on the various mail contracts.

The mail contracts normally have the individual stops and dates thus one may be able to bracket in time when a specific station was in postal use.

The full-color, hardbound book runs 1,096 pages and illustrates 242 covers, 582 maps and 360 other images. A DVD included shows more than 800 covers, many which are not illustrated in the book; annual postmaster general reports; and other reports to Congress between 1817 and 1878. Also included are more than 6,000 images of the manuscript “Railroad Contracts by States.”

“The bonus disk is a boon to postal historical research,” wrote Diane DeBlois in the November issue of “The Chronicle of the U.S. Classic Postal Issues” by the U.S. Philatelic Classics Society. “Although these reports might be sourced otherwise from the internet, to have them all in one place is a gift. … So, bravo to a brave British postal historian for supplying his American counterparts with such a valuable resource.”

In late November, Feldman appeared at Chicagopex 2017 stamp show in Itasca, Illinois, where he gave a presentation based on the book and signed copies.

The competition, open to all organizations and publishers of philatelic periodicals, was founded in 2013 to recognize promotion of philatelic research and the preservation of philatelic knowledge through publication, according to outgoing APS Librarian Tara Murray, as posted in a recent APRL blog.

The Philatelic Literature Review, published by the American Philatelic Research Library, and The American Philatelist, published by the American Philatelic Society, took fourth and 10th places, respectively, in the same competition.

Yesterday, the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) offered a sneak peek of their planned new issues for 2018. In a press release including images of the issues announced, the USPS highlighted “a portion of its 2018 stamp program.”